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Today am in need to grasp something solid and immovable, so that I may wake up tomorrow to start my second draft. Maybe.
…so with this in mind, my next entry in the blog is the bibliography of draft 1.

There is a strange feeling I experience when my gaze moves from my laptop whilst writing a script of a story based in the dry red Goldfields of Western Australia to the lush green fields outside my studio window at the Artist Residency quarters at Bundanon Trust. Is this the same country?

I have been in Bundanon for 3 weeks, and I finally finished the first draft of the play I have wanted to write since I began this blog. Instead of celebrating, I am feeling vulnerable. Writing is a solo activity, and although I am enjoying meeting and sharing stories and meals with other artists here, I still spend much of my time alone with my laptop, living in a surreal internal world between desert and hinterland, fact and fiction, and tropical Broome, where I was before I came here, winter in Tokyo, where I am going to be in two weeks time for Christmas, my brief 2 day return to my apartment in Rozelle last weekend, and my memories of the last two years since I had an inkling of what it was I wanted to write, I no longer seem to know if what I have written makes any sense or if the story is of any interest to anyone other than me, and what and how, if at all, am I going to do next with this script.

Today am in need to grasp something solid and immovable, so that I may wake up tomorrow to start my second draft. Maybe.

Several months later, I found out that instead of me giving a talk, she wanted me to perform at the conference. Yikes. I was no where ready to perform this work. I wasn’t even thinking of performing it myself, and I was still researching the material. As a matter of fact, I’d stopped researching since my health issues last year, and this project had been stagnant for a good nine months.

Composer and musical performer Terumi Narushima, who I had collaborated with before on Yasukichi Murakami – Through a Distant Lens and Awase Miso, also happened to be on the JSAA Conference steering committee. She advised me that if I read my talk slowly, and with long pauses, and if she played the piano for me during my pauses… well, we would have a show.

So Terumi and I have decided to collaborate again.

As this work was still in progress, we especially compiled our first instalment of You’ve Mistaken Me for a Butterfly for the 2017 JSAA Conference at the University of Wollongong, and performed it for the conference delegates on the last night of the conference.

What I am really chuffed about is that this work is presented in context of performed poetry. I have dabbled in amateur poetry since I was a kid, fancying myself as a poet, yet too shy and not confident enough about my poems. But now, thanks to Vera and Terumi (and Carol Hayes, Rina Kikuchi, Laura Dales, Lyn Parker and many others), I might just add writing poetry to my job description.

* * *

Here are the dates and venues available to the public:

You’ve Mistaken Me for a Butterfly (the first instalment)

POETRY ON THE MOVE Boundary Crossings: A Festival of Poetry, presented by International Poetry Studies Institute (IPSI) in the Faculty of Arts and Design at the University of Canberra.

16 September 2017, 2PM at the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, ACT.

You’ve Mistaken Me for a Butterfly (the second instalment)

IAS PUBLIC PERFORMANCE, presented by the Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS), University of Western Australia (UWA).

25 September 2017, 6PM at the Callaway Music Auditorium, UWA, Crawley, WA